SMARTDEER project has been developed to work with stakeholders, for stakeholders. We are leading the first nationally-coordinated initiative for deer monitoring in Ireland by collecting and analyzing empirical data across the country that will help managers to make evidence-based decisions.
Neither the up-to-date precise distribution nor the population density of the four species of deer is currently known, and no national coordination for the collection of deer data exists. Recent advancements in technology such as smartphone and desktop geospatial capabilities are underused in Ireland for wildlife, especially for deer and our project aims to close this gap by introducing tools that will allow national deer monitoring in real-time.
This survey will produce up-to-date knowledge of deer distribution across Ireland using expert stakeholder and community-based knowledge. Initially, we aim to fill data gaps from the last five years (2015-2020) by conducting a baseline survey. Once this baseline data have been collected, we will run the survey annually to track changes in deer distribution in real-time. Thank you for your participation in helping achieve this goal.
For more information on the project and our goals please visit our website here. Thank you for participating in the survey from the SMARTDEER team, Simone Ciuti, UCD assistant professor of Wildlife Biology; Barry McMahon, UCD associate professor of Wildlife Conservation; Maarten Nieuwenhuis, UCD full professor of Forestry Virginia Morera Pujol, UCD postdoc; Kilian Murphy, Research MSc student; Sarah Keenan, Research MSc student; Charles Harper, Research Manager.
This project is funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and University College Dublin.